#Ex-Secretary of State Pompeo joins Fox News as contributor

Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state for the Trump administration, has been signed with Fox News as a contributor.

“Mike Pompeo is one of America’s most recognized and respected voices on foreign policy and national security issues,” said Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott. “I look forward to his contributions across our range of platforms to share his distinct perspective with our millions of viewers.”

Pompeo, a former director of the CIA, served as US secretary of state from April 2018 until President Donald Trump left office on Jan. 20.  

He was a key architect of Trump’s summits with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, marking the first between a sitting US president and North Korea, but failed to get the hermit state to dismantle its nuclear weapons. Pompeo also backed Trump’s effort to pull the US out of the Iran nuclear deal and was known for his hardline stance on immigration along the southern border.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a gig as a Fox News contributor can be lucrative. After being named Trump’s national security adviser in 2018, John Bolton disclosed that he had been earning a salary of $569,423 serving as a contributor for Fox, according to his financial disclosure form.

“As a now former diplomat and member of Congress, and in this new role at FOX News Media, I intend to give viewers a candid, no-nonsense look at geopolitics, international relations and the America First policies that helped chart the course for unprecedented American prosperity and security,” said Pompeo.

Pompeo joins Trump veterans Kayleigh McEnany, former White House press secretary; Larry Kudlow, a Trump economic adviser; and Lara Trump, the ex-president’s daughter-in-law who worked on his campaign.

The network had earlier hired another former press secretary, Sara Huckabee Sanders, but that relationship ended when she declared she was running for governor of Arkansas.

The appointment comes at a time, however, when many former top Trump aides appear to be having a tough time landing private-sector jobs compared to past administrations amid concerns that his repeated claims that the election was stolen helped fuel the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, told the Washington Post that many Trump aides appear to be facing a jobs desert as they try to find new gigs in the private sector.

The report noted that four former cabinet members of the George W. Bush administration in 2009 had been named to the board of public corporations this far into the next administration. By comparison, no such appointments have been made for former Trump cabinet members.